Tuesday, April 25, 2006

"It is true that individuals who subscribe to anallegedly unified and self-evident "scientificworld view" of the modern type are seen ashaving failed to engage the larger intellectualchallenge of the age--thereby receiving thesame judgement in the post-modern erathat the ingenuous religious person receivedfrom science in the modern era. In virtuallyall contemporary disciplines, it is recognizedthat the prodiguous complexity, subtlety, andmultivalence of reality far transcend the graspof any one intellectual approach, and thatonly a committed openness to the interplayof many perspectives can meet theextraordinary challenges of the postmodernera. But contemporary science has itselfbecome increasingly self-aware andself-critical, less prone to a naive scientism,more conscious of its epistemological andexistential limitations. Nor is contemporaryscience singular, having given rise to anumber of radically divergent interpretationsof the world, many of which differ sharply fromwhat was previously the conventionalscientific wisdom.

Commmon to these new perspectives hasbeen the imperative to rethink and reformulatethe human relation to nature, an imperativedriven by the growing recognition that modernscience's mechanistic and objectivist conceptionof nature was not only limited but fundamentallyflawed."